Thursday, August 26, 2010

It's proving to be an exciting summer for the site, and, in a sign of our ongoing progress, we're excited to (retroactively) announce two new members of team reddit.

Starting earlier this month, we've had an intern working out of our New York office. Her name is Alex (a.k.a. cupcake1713), and she's a junior at Wesleyan University double majoring in Japanese and Science in Society. Like our much-overworked and awesome community manager Erik, she's way into photography and videography, and the two of them have been working on a secret project that might help us raise our hiring budget.

Speaking of income streams, it's about time we introduced reddit's first dedicated sales rep, Lia (aka pixelinaa). Though more of a lurker, she reads reddit all the time and has been spending the last few months patiently explaining to advertisers that it's kind of a big deal.

It's a bit of an uphill climb convincing timid companies to try out a new form of media, so let's kick off this comment thread by filling up Lia's to-call list: Who would you like to see advertise on reddit? As much as we like the unintentional comedy that Google AdSense has provided, and though I, for one, sleep better now that my computer has had a fresh registry cleaning, we know we can do a lot better now that we have a shark to chase down leads.

As long as we're asking for feedback, we've also created a page where you can check out some of our sales materials that Lia's been presenting to advertisers. These follow a similar format to sales materials used by Wired and Ars Technica and are written with ad agencies in mind. So, keeping in mind that this isn't intended for your eyes but rather as fodder for ad agencies, what do you think?

Finally, since it seems to have worked well for soap and beef jerky, we're wondering what other products might be of interest to the reddit community. If you work for or know anyone who would benefit from advertising on the site, please provide an introduction so we can both drive up our sales numbers.